Douglas Messerli | Performance Anxieties [Introduction]

performance anxieties

by Douglas Messerli

 

Given that at the heart of cinema is acting and much of its blood is stolen from the theater, one might argue that hundreds of films, in their constant reference to theater and filmmaking itself, are focused on performance anxieties. How many dozens of anxious actors, dancers, and other performers waiting in the wings in cinema history have shaken with fear, while actors hidden away in their dressing rooms have screamed out, “I can’t go on!”

     The five films I write about below, however, are different in the fact that the anxiety in each instance has something to do with the anxieties of same sex relationships that go hand in hand with their theatrical butterflies in the stomach. In US director Reid Waterer’s Performance Anxiety, from which I have stolen my group title, the actors are not necessarily amateur in terms of their experience, but are most certainly in relationship to the gay roles which they are now required to enact. Their anxiety about acting has more to do with their own sexual anxieties than anything else. As do the anxieties that arise for the obviously talented film actor Sami in Pakistani director Suni Shanker’s Next Scene, in which the director, a character played by Shanker from a script he wrote, stretches the boundaries of his film in an attempt to explore his own gay sexual attractions to his lead actor. Even the audience feels some anxiety in this work, wondering where the line between the fiction of the film and the sexual urges expressed by its creator cross over into behavior that might take place off the screen—to very place to which the actor retreats.

   The young drag queen-in-the-making, Paul, is not only anxious about his first on-stage drag role, but about exposing his interest in crossdressing to all his school peers and families, including his own disapproving father in British director Michael Beddoes’ Sequins.

     In the final two short films, Canadian director Linnea Ritland’s Amateur Dramatics, and US director Juno Mitchell’s Making a Scene, the actors are all definitely amateurs struggling not only to play characters in Shakespeare’s dramas, but struggling with their own sexual desires toward their fellow actors as well.

     The amazing thing is that all of these anxious actors end up giving performances that are either quite convincing of gay behavior or somewhat resolve their own uncertain sexual desires as young LGBTQ beings—even if their stage or film acting still leaves something to be desired.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2023